James Thurber Dog QuotesFor You To Enjoy

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Below are 12 James Thurber dog quotes. Thurber is best known as a humorist and cartoonist for The New Yorker magazine. He wrote several stories about dogs, including "The Dog Who Bit People." The Dog Department: James Thurber on Hounds, Scotties, and Talking Poodles, edited by Michael J. Rosen, is a posthumous collection of Thurber's dog stories.

Dogs are obsessed with being happy.

He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn't have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in.

I am not a cat man, but a dog man, and all felines can tell this at a glance—a sharp, vindictive glance.

I myself have known some profoundly thoughtful dogs.

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that certain dogs I have known will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.

If you are a police dog, where's your badge?

[Asked of his German shepherd]

In his grief over the loss of a dog, a little boy stands for the first time on tiptoe, peering into the rueful morrow of manhood. After this most inconsolable of sorrows there is nothing life can do to him that he will not be able somehow to bear.

It did not take Man long—probably not more than a hundred centuries—to discover that all the animals except the dog were impossible around the house. One has but to spend a few days with an aardvark or llama, command a water buffalo to sit up and beg or try to housebreak a moose, to perceive how wisely Man set about his process of elimination and selection.

Man is troubled by what might be called the Dog Wish, a strange and involved compulsion to be as happy and carefree as a dog.

Muggs was always sorry, Mother said, when he bit someone, but we could never understand how she figured this out. He didn't act sorry.

The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.

The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.

"He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn't have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in."

Thurber could be talking about Relish. Whenever it got too hot in the house, I took her to the beach, where she ran into the ocean to cool off. And she'd fetch a stick thrown into the surf for far longer than she should have.